What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback is crucial when designing and making media products, that is because the best way to make sure an audience likes a product is to ask them and find out what their views, opinions and wants are for the particular product you are producing.

 

Throughout my project I have tried to refer back to audience feedback and use it to develop a product that audience will relate to and enjoy. During the process of making my products I have found focus groups to be an invaluable resource when gathering audience feedback. This is mainly because I can gather precise information and find out specific opinions and views as well as how they would change the products and what exactly they like/dislike. Whereas I found that questionnaires were more qualitative and thus they may answer my question but that doesn’t give me an answer and even with open questions the response is sometimes unclear.

 

Audience feedback has affected my product drastically and fuelled its development and construction. One of the main changes my audience feedback inspired was the change from using a coloured heart to using the black and white image that then became the theme.  The style and cover image was also picked by my target audience out of a 3 possible designs. I also gained feedback on what it was that attracted the audience to that design so that I could consider it when designing the magazine advert.  I learnt that they liked the fact that the image was easily recognisable and stood out against existing products. Whereas they felt that the sky design was too plain and was similar to many other existing products.  They also thought that the other two products failed to correctly express the band and didn’t represent the music.

One of the other key aspects to the music video that my audience feedback had a part in changing is the difference between the original idea of the girl and boy lacking emotion and being almost robotic and the final video where they are more realistic with emotions and have more relaxed posture is due to criticism by my audience. They felt that the song was very emotional and that having a emotionless relationship made no sense, they believed that the video should show the boy and girl in a more natural way so that it reflected the real relationships the song was written about.  I then decided to change my music video and that by having them in less rigid positions and showing their emotions that it would help the audience connect more with the song as well as making the video a better representation of the song. However I did find that as I had not initially wanted expressive people that the change to the video meant that they were no longer a great choice as they weren’t use to giving close up expressive facial expressions. Although by the time I had decided to change this most of the filming had already been done and trying to cast new actors was impractical.